Five Modern Japanese Novelists

by Donald Keene

  Everybody laughed and attributed these remarks to Shiba’s tipsiness, but a week or so later, to my astonishment, I was offered a job with the Asahi as a guest editor. I accepted, beginning a happy ten years of association with the Asahi. Needless to say, I was extremely grateful to Shiba, but I was puzzled as to what I might contribute to the Asahi that would justify his linking me with the great novelist Natsume Sōseki. Gradually I came to realize it was not so much that he believed I would be able to write outstanding articles for the newspaper as that he hoped my presence would give it a more international quality. Although those who worked for the Asahi naturally were proud of their newspaper and believed that its concern with international matters was fully attested by its many correspondents who reported on developments abroad, not one non-Japanese was writing for the Asahi in Japan.

  Shiba once remarked to me that it might do the staff of the Asahi good if I ate in the employees’ cafeteria, in this way bringing home to the other Asahi employees eating there that they had a colleague who, though a foreigner, was as much a part of the organization as a Japanese. I accordingly ate in the cafeteria a couple of times, but I confess that I could not detect any effect resulting from this gesture. Everyone on the Asahi was friendly, and I think I contributed to the newspaper with the four serials I wrote during the following years, but my presence was not enough to make the Asahi more—or less—international. It was typical of Shiba to have hoped that even one person could affect a large organization. Perhaps if I had had the qualifications to participate in discussions of politics and economics with other members of the Asahi staff, I might have better fulfilled Shiba’s hope that I would be an agent of internationalism.

  In a sense it was strange that Shiba should have been so eager to make Japan more international. His enormous popularity as a novelist and essayist stemmed not from his advocacy of internationalism but from his ability to reassure Japanese, stunned by both defeat in war and the rejection of traditional values, that they could be proud of their history and the great men of Japan. Behind this success was the long Japanese tradition of presenting history in the garb of fiction.

  The Japanese fondness for historical fiction goes back at least as far as A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), written in the eleventh century. This long, rambling work presents not only the bare bones of history—births and deaths, promotions and demotions, and the like—but also the poetry composed on various occasions and, most interestingly, the private conversations of great figures of state, even those held in places where no historian could have overheard them. The Great Mirror (Ōkagami), written a little later, opens as two exceedingly old men—one 180 years old and the other 170 years old—reminisce about events known to them from long ago. Most of their anecdotes, though of literary interest, cannot be taken seriously as history, if only because the narrators, despite their great age, could not possibly have seen or heard what they describe. In any case, the purpose of the unknown author was essentially literary: few of the memorable events in The Great Mirror can be accepted as historical truth.

  The Tale of the Heike, the closest the Japanese ever came to composing an epic, was an artistic re-creation of the warfare that had occurred at the end of the twelfth century between the Taira and Minamoto clans. In general, it follows a course of historical events that can be verified from other sources, but it also contains innumerable conversations and even unspoken thoughts that could only have been the products of the authors’ imagination. The story, declaimed to musical accompaniment (normally by a recitant-priest), grew richer in description and human interest as successive generations of recitants expanded the text, until what may have been originally a bare account of who killed whom became a major work of literature.

  Shiba’s historical fiction followed a rather similar development. He first amassed a large collection of source materials that he carefully read over until he was thoroughly familiar with the facts behind the story he was about to relate; but once he actually began writing, he did not hesitate when necessary to intuit what the characters in his stories had thought or said on a particular occasion. The resulting works were exciting in a way rarely true of the documents that were his sources, and as a result his books regularly became best-sellers. Japanese readers found in his novels not only the excitement of a good story effectively told but the pleasure of having their past restored to them. This was particularly true of readers at the time when Shiba began writing: the Japanese heritage had been either totally discarded or else reduced to the childish fantasy of costume movies.

  The figures from the past whom Shiba resuscitated were not fictitious; they were for the most part unknown to his readers, but he made them and the drama of their times come alive. He helped the Japanese discover that their country’s history did not consist solely of the heroics of sworded adversaries. His heroes had intelligence and ideals, and if they used their swords, it was not simply to display their skill at fencing.

  It has been annoying to some Japanese, especially those who would name Shiba as their favorite author, that his works are not known abroad. They sometimes attribute this neglect to the foreign preference for exoticism or the desire to think of Japan in terms of the fragile evocations of a Kawabata novel. They wonder why foreigners cannot appreciate the excitement of a Shiba novel, which is much closer to the Japanese of today than a novel by Tanizaki or Kawabata. But even the most enthusiastic Japanese admirers of Shiba’s writings never mentioned his name as a possible recipient of a Nobel Prize; and naturally, the Swedish Academy had not heard of a writer whose works, with minor exceptions, had never been translated into English. Although many Japanese, including persons of unquestioned critical discrimination, were convinced that Shiba was a major writer and deplored the foreign ignorance of his works, his works were not included in typical collections of masterpieces of modern Japanese literature and were not discussed by serious Japanese critics. This tended to dampen the interest of foreign scholars in his novels.

  The admiration of Shiba by the Japanese public at large has not abated. It often happens in Japan that interest in a writer’s works markedly diminishes after his death, but this has not been true of Shiba. Soon after he died in 1996, many bookshops set aside a special corner where his works were displayed. This was not the first time such a corner had been created: they are fairly common immediately after a prominent writer’s death or after he has won the Nobel Prize. Usually the corner disappears after a few weeks, when journalistic interest in the author has petered out, but in Shiba’s case his corner seems to have become a permanent feature of bookshops. Not content with publishing new editions of his books, publishers have desperately sought to create “new” works by and about Shiba, extracting his philosophy of life from his writings or collecting the heartwarming reminiscences of his friends.

  Admiration of Shiba’s novels and essays is very much intertwined with admiration for Shiba the man. He is as close to being a twentieth-century hero as the Japanese possess. Unlike more typical heroes, he remained modest, never calling attention to himself or his books, but forever seeking to understand the nature of Japan. His writings brought Japanese readers the satisfaction of discovering their own history, but it was also important to them that it was Shiba who had made the discovery. His novels often contain digressions, labeled as such; but even though they interrupt the narration, they are welcome to readers because they tell the reader something about Shiba himself, or at least about the associations that a particular event aroused in his memory. He is very much a participant in his writings.

  For most foreign readers, however, Shiba’s personality is not of such great interest, and the digressions may not seem justified. They may even find that his works suffer from not having had the benefit of a good editor. Repetitions are not unusual, but information that readers should possess at the beginning of a novel is sometimes not revealed until late in the work, and then only casually. These faults—if they are faults—may puzzle or irritate non-Japanese, b
ut they do not distress Japanese readers, who are carried along by the movement of Shiba’s prose and by their confidence in him as the author.

  Japanese who had complained because Shiba’s works were unknown in foreign countries were naturally pleased when they learned that a program had been initiated by the Japanese government to sponsor translations. However, when the first translations finally appeared, the reviews were mostly negative. This was not the fault of the translations: Eileen Kato’s translations of four novellas published as Drunk as a Lord (Yotte sōrō) are in particular admirable, in every way worthy of the originals. The main stumbling block to appreciating Shiba’s writings abroad seems to be the difference in the expectations of Japanese and non-Japanese readers with respect to the characters who appear in his works of historical fiction. For example, non-Japanese readers are likely to have trouble sympathizing with and feeling respect for a daimyo who, though he is reputed to be distinguished by his intelligence and accomplishments, is portrayed as a chronic drunkard and who, on occasion, unable to hold his liquor, vomits uninhibitedly. Conversely, Japanese readers may consider this a regrettable but harmless flaw in the daimyo’s character; they may even feel closer to Yamanouchi Yōdō because of an all-too-human failing. Western readers, however, being unaccustomed to vomiting heroes, may find Yamanouchi Yōdō repulsive. Again, when Shiba scrupulously notes that Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun, a man he obviously admires, always sent for a prostitute as soon as he was settled in lodgings for the night, Western readers may experience a momentary shock, although for the Japanese of the past this would have been considered perfectly acceptable behavior. It is to Shiba’s credit that he did not falsify his portraits of Yōdō and Yoshinobu in the hope of endearing them to readers, nor did he resort to anachronisms in the manner of another Japanese writer of historical fiction who had the twelfth-century tyrant Taira Kiyomori deplore the lack of progress in Japan.

  The task of the translator of Shiba’s historical fiction is to go beyond understanding the text and to render it in acceptable English. A novel is apt to contain names and institutions that, though familiar to most Japanese, might baffle Western readers. Should an explanation be silently included in the translated text? Or would footnotes be better? Or should it be left to the readers to guess the meaning? And should the repetitions be pruned?

  It probably is easier to translate an invented work by Shiba like Storm Winds in Tartary (Dattan shippū roku, 1987), which is set largely in Manchuria during the seventeenth century, than a work describing Japanese history of the same period. Because the setting was foreign, Shiba could not count on readers’ familiarity with the people and events described, and he therefore explained the customs of the Manchus and related in detail how it was possible for them, a people who numbered no more than a few hundred thousand, to conquer the huge and populous Chinese empire. Shiba had studied Mongolian at the Osaka University of Foreign Languages, and his knowledge of the languages of Central Asia gave convincing authenticity to this novel, but the story was essentially invented by Shiba himself.

  This work might be more successful in translation than Shiba’s novels treating Japanese of the past. But it is unlikely that Storm Winds in Tartary, for all its exciting plot, will ever become one of Shiba’s favorites with the Japanese public, for it contains none of the revelations of the characteristics of the Japanese people that gave his historical fiction its special appeal.

  The part of Shiba’s oeuvre that is most difficult for non-Japanese to appreciate is his style. Shiba wrote in a vivid way that won him readers from the outset of his career. The special quality of this style is largely incommunicable in a translation, however accomplished. Of course, style is the part of any work that is most likely to be lost in translation, but one does not expect to find style of this quality in popular works of historical fiction. Unless the translator succeeds in communicating the style that gave an éclat to Shiba’s novels, their great popularity must remain a mystery to the non-Japanese.

  The main problem in foreign appreciation of Shiba’s novels, however, is that although they supplied a need felt by the Japanese, it was not necessarily a need of foreigners. While reading a work by Shiba, a Japanese is likely to feel again and again something like “This is what it means to be a Japanese.” There no longer are samurai in Japan, but the ideals of the samurai are intelligible to Japanese, even those of a distinctly nonsamurai background, who can understand, for example, the reasons that led Kawai Tsugunosuke, a samurai of capability and enlightened views described in Shiba’s novel The Pass (Tōge, 1968), to take up arms against the Meiji government, even though he knew that this action could lead only to disaster and death. Of course, with study a non-Japanese can appreciate why the characters in a Shiba novel appeal to Japanese readers, but this is not the same as immediate recognition.

  I admire Shiba’s writings, but he lives in my memory less as a novelist than as a wonderful human being. My attitude would disappoint him, for he put a great deal of himself into his works, but it is rarer to find a man like Shiba than a successful novelist. He was a good man and not merely in the conventional sense of doing no wrong. His writings inspired a whole country, not with patriotic zeal, but with a quiet awareness of what being a Japanese has meant through history.

  Shiba tended to be pessimistic about the future of Japan, but he gave solace and courage to Japanese, persuading them that the life of even the most ordinary member of society may be worth celebrating. Although Masaoka Chūzaburō, the poignant hero of The Sound of Peoples’ Footsteps (Hitobito no ashioto, 1981), was the adopted son of the great poet Masaoka Shiki, he was devoid of poetic talent and led a most prosaic life. But Shiba, who normally chose for his characters men who had played an active role during a time of historical change, wrote a memorable novel (in two volumes) about a man who otherwise was unknown to history.

  Shiba was interested in people wherever he went, as he demonstrated in the series of books describing his travels in many parts of the world, but Japan was never far from his mind. I think that Shiba, paraphrasing Terence, might have said of himself, “I am a Japanese, and nothing that concerns a Japanese do I deem a matter of indifference to me.” This stance helped give his books their extraordinary popularity with Japanese readers; it may also account for the difficulty that some non-Japanese readers have experienced in accounting for his high reputation.

  This situation may change with the publication of more translations. It was a privilege to have known such a hero, and I hope that many others, and not only his countrymen, will discover him through his books.

  It is hard to know how future critics and readers will evaluate the writings of the five writers I have discussed here. But it is hard for me to resist predicting that they, whose writings are so different, will continue to be remembered and read not only in Japan but in the entire world.

  *Shiba’s mention of a “world’s fair” (bankokuhaku) was probably inspired by the extremely successful Osaka Exposition of the year before.

  *Shiba Ryōtarō and Donarudo Kīn, Nihonjin to nihon bunka (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Sha, 1967), p. 4.

  *Sauveur Antoine Candau (1897–1955) arrived in Japan in 1925 and, except for the war years, was in Japan from then until his death. He wrote books in Japanese (Shiba praised his style) and compiled a Latin–Japanese lexicon.

  *Shiba Ryōtarō, Kaidō wo yuku 8:16, in Shiba Ryōtarō zenshū, vol. 59 (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū Sha, 1999).

  Supplemental Readings

  The following titles are recommended to readers who desire a closer acquaintance with the five authors discussed in this book. (Some books, it will be apparent, treat more than one of these authors.) The list is by no means exhaustive.

  General

  Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

  Nagashima, Yoichi, ed. Return to Japan. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2001.

  Tsuruta, Kinya, and Thomas E. Swann. Approaches to the Modern Japanese No
vel. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1976.

  Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976.

  Tanizaki Jun’ichirō

  There is, fortunately, a complete bibliography: Tanizaki in Western Languages: A Bibliography of Translations and Studies, compiled by Adriana Boscaro (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2000). It lists not only translations but also critical studies of Tanizaki. Many of Tanizaki’s works have been translated into English, French, Italian, and other European languages. Among the most important available in English are the following:

  A Cat, a Man, and Two Women. Translated by Paul McCarthy. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990.

  Childhood Years. Translated by Paul McCarthy. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1988.

  Diary of a Mad Old Man. Translated by Howard S. Hibbett. New York: Knopf, 1965.

  The Key. Translated by Howard S. Hibbett. New York: Knopf, 1961.

  The Makioka Sisters. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Knopf, 1957.

  Naomi. Translated by Anthony H. Chambers. New York: Knopf, 1985.

  The Reed Cutter and Captain Shigemoto’s Mother. Translated by Anthony H. Chambers. New York: Knopf, 1994.

  The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot. Translated by Anthony H. Chambers. New York: Knopf, 1982.

  Seven Japanese Tales. Translated by Howard S. Hibbett. New York: Knopf, 1963.

  Some Prefer Nettles. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Knopf, 1955.

  Critical Works in English

  Boscaro, Adriana, and Anthony H. Chambers, eds. A Tanizaki Feast: The International Symposium in Venice. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, no. 24. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998.